by Squigie » Tue Jul 07, 2020 12:40 pm
It wasn't initially obvious to me that this was an inverter you were dealing with.
Once that was pointed out, I started thinking about all of the trailers and motorhomes that I've owned or worked on*, and where their inverters were and what kind of access there was. *(Too many!)
As long as you get the installation right the first time and find a safe way to leave plenty of slack in the wiring, I think you should be okay.
But additional access is never a bad thing.
Most of my small trailers and tent trailers had the inverters in a dinette seat or the side of a storage area. Access was easy or reasonably acceptable.
Most of the larger trailers and all but one of the motorhomes (the exception below) had uncomfortable but reasonable access to the back of the inverters from the outside - via the storage area for the shore power cord.
With two exceptions, I never had to do more than probe a few of them with a multimeter, unless I was just flipping a main breaker for storage or travel.
Those exceptions were:
1. A tent trailer with an inverter that would overheat and short out in about 5 minutes while on shore power, and randomly trip the main breaker on battery power. I never camped anywhere with shore power, and most of the DC system in that trailer was already cross-connected with brake and tail lights and screwed up from the previous owner, so I just cut and removed all wires to and from the inverter, fully rewired the brake and tail lights, and went to a propane lantern for lighting. (The furnace was already a convection unit requiring no electricity, and had been installed in place of the fridge.) Ditching the 30+ lbs of shore power cord and 120+ lbs of batteries more than made up for leaving the weight of a dead inverter to plug the hole in the bulkhead.
2. A motorhome with an inverter / power center that wouldn't charge the coach batteries any more. The size and layout of that motorhome meant that the shore line storage area did not align with the back of the inverter. The wiring on the inverter / power center only had about 1" of slack. And the inverter was in a small compartment under the fridge, that was glued and stapled together after the inverter was installed. As a result, the only way to get to the back of that inverter, or replace it, was to remove the refrigerator and pull the compartment top off, or cut a big hole in one of the walls. So, I did nothing. I went to pre-charging the batteries, a "lights only" approach to power consumption, and I could recharge the batteries, if absolutely necessary, with a small generator. (Which I only ever had to do once.)
C. I never worked on this one, other than minor troubleshooting, but followed and was often queried for input on the epic saga. My grandparents owned a 2003 Allegro motorhome that had serious issues charging the batteries, and they would discharge rapidly for no apparent reason. Eventually, we traced the issue to the "digital" inverter / power center. In this case, the inverter was above the fridge, and had the same problem as my motorhome - the fridge had to come out, or big holes had to be cut. And the quotes that they got for the job were incredible ($2k+). They fought that piece of garbage for almost 10 years, before finally reaching the boiling point. They couldn't stand the concept of paying thousands of dollars to fix it, simply because the manufacturer cared more about ease of assembly than future repairs; but also didn't think they'd ever be happy with it again, if they did pay out (and they were, by then, far too old to be worrying about electrical issues). So, they dumped the motorhome - with full disclosure about its problems - for a substantial loss.
This just keeps getting longer. I remembered another one.
IV. A trailer that a friend of mine owned. The inverter crapped out while deep into an isolated canyon in Utah. The only access to the back of it required removing the generator from its rear compartment. Possible? Yes. Reasonable access once done? Yes, if a bit filthy. But then you can't troubleshoot the system, because half of the wiring had to be disconnected to remove the generator.
(We did dump the generator out of the back of his trailer and hotwire the trailer to my small generator, on that trip. He went home with my generator strapped to his bumper, and his generator in the back of his truck.)
I'm not sure what the moral of these stories is, but I think it's something along the lines of:
Think it through.
Access is good.
Lack of access is a death sentence -- in the forms of abandoning the equipment in place, living with constant problems, or in having to tear your trailer up and do substantial repairs.
Complicated access may not be beneficial.
